Robots are cool

I’ve been running SuSE 9.2 Professional as the sole operating system on my laptop for more than a month now. I had intended to run both Windows XP pro and SuSE, but decided against it (OK, OK, I made an arse of the partitioning!). I have long realised that Linux has the potential to be a really good desktop operating system for me, but the last time I had tried it out was with Mandrake and SuSE 8.0ish – both of which were a total nightmare to configure for my hardware, and that was with a desktop machine. Mr Redpath’s own struggles with a laptop and Mandrake at the same sort of time had also frightened me enough! Recently, however, I had the chance to have a quick play with SuSE 9.1 as well as get shown a few cool things by Alex (who has forgotten more than I know about Linux!) which really convinced me to try it out again.

I’ll be making some comparisons with Windows XP, becuase that’s what I had been using before Linux. However, unlike many people who switch to Linux from Windows, I didn’t do it out of some strange and intense hatred of Windows. In fact, I like XP Pro very much, I’ve just found that I’m liking Linux more.

KDE

Stuff

Konqueror

I have been a long time Opera fan and, on Windows, used it for browsing, mail and RSS feeds. My natural instinct was to use Opera again in KDE, and I did, but increasingly I found myself using Konqueror more and more. Not because I preferred browsing with it (I still prefer Opera), but just because of the the way it integrates with the other things in KDE. Konqueror is everything that the Windows Explorer tries to be, only implemented much better. File and network browsing, the web, audio CDs, bluetooth and lots more are all handled, generally very well, by Konqueror and the rendering engine is also very good.

KMail

Cool feature – if you talk about an attachment, but don’t have naything attached, it will alert you before you send the message!